Path planning and obstacle avoidance for AUV: A review

Abstract Autonomous underwater vehicle plays a more and more important role in the exploration of marine resources. Path planning and obstacle avoidance is the core technology to realize the autonomy of AUV, which will determine the application prospect of AUV. This paper mainly describes the state-of-the-art methods of path planning and obstacle avoidance for AUV and aims to become a starting point for researchers who are initiating their endeavors in this field. Moreover, the objective of this paper is to give a comprehensive overview of work on recent advances and new breakthroughs, also to discuss some future directions worthy to research in this area. The focus of this article is put on these path planning algorithms that deal with constraints and characteristics of AUV and the influence of marine environments. Since most of the time AUV will operate in the environments full of obstacles, we divide path planning methods of AUV into two categories: global path planning with known static obstacles, and local path planning with unknown and dynamic obstacles. We describe the basic principles of each method and survey most related work to them. An in-depth discussion and comparisons between different path planning algorithms are also provided. Lastly, we propose some potential future research directions that are worthy to investigate in this field.